I Will Remember

How many times have I stood, or sat somewhere and thought, I will remember this? Times when I wanted to remember every detail, every minuscule moment from its colors, to its scent?

My first conscious memory of this was when I was three years old, playing house in the living room of my parent's home in Champagne, Illinois. I saw myself in the mirror and I thought, "I am three years old. This is me! I want to grow up and have a little girl just like me and I will live in a white house with pink shutters." I actually have memories before this, but this is the first time I wanted to remember a moment. I was a much loved first child and grand child. All I knew at this point in my life was love, so it is reasonable to believe I couldn't imagine not loving me.

The next consciously chosen moment I was in first grade and I was so proud. I thought, "I will always remember tonight and Daddy walking me to my very first open house! Some day I will go to college just like he did and maybe he will remember this too."

At ten my father remarked about something ten years prior to that date and I thought, "Imagine remembering something ten years ago! Someday it will be ten years from now and I will remember this moment. Here, standing in my bedroom door on a spring morning of 1960 when I couldn't remember ten years ago!"

There have been others, I seemed to always be aware that time was passing, that each moment was worth remembering, but some stand out more than others. I remember meeting a boy in the lobby of my dormitory and thinking, "This is an important night. I will never forget the way this boy's face looked as I walked out of the elevator." I didn't either. I married him two years later.

I remember going to pick up a little girl who ran out shouting, "My Angells are here, my Angells are here!" It was a very special day because she was my first foster child and I wanted to remember every detail, having no idea that I was meeting my daughter for the very first time.

And I remember looking down at the blond haired, blue-eyed baby the social worker placed in my arms thinking, "This is my son! I will never forget this day." I remember everything from his warm baby smell to the way his tiny fingers wrapped around one of mine and the awe and surge of love that coursed through me.

And the day the doctor lay my youngest son on my stomach and I saw that mass of black hair, those frantic little arms flailing around and those feet kicking like an Olympic swimmer, I knew I would never forget that moment, a moment wrapped in hospital smells and the tears in his father's eyes.

Life's moments are memorable. How many times have I stood in the window watching my children walk down the driveway, going to catch the bus and thought I will remember this day. And I do.

But there are also other moments like the day my mother came to visit on her 58th birthday and as we walked down that same driveway I thought, "Some day I will remember this day when Mom and I just walked down here talking like it was any other day." And I do, I remember every word we shared, but because it was the last time I really ever talked to her.

I treasure all these moments from the past and so many others. They are the monumental stepping stones in my life, the things that defined who I was and who I would become. There will be others as time goes on. Mile posts whose importance is really unknown until later when I am able to look back on them and remember what I thought in those actual moments when it occurred.

Some people read the same books over and over and others watch the same movies. In this same way, I play these little vignettes in my mind. They come out of the blue, like multi-dimensional movies that leap from the past and play themselves out as intensely as if I were on the Holodeck of the Enterprise and I am still profoundly touched. Good, bad, but never indifferent, they shape the future in ways that cannot be ignored.

And I do not ever want to ignore them